Donald Trump finally fired someone over the Signalgate scandal – and he still managed to screw it up
Back when the Signalgate scandal first broke and then kept snowballing, I wrote that it wouldn’t go away until Donald Trump fired a recognizable name. That was the only thing that was going to convince the media that there was no longer a story, and convince the public that the problem had been corrected. If Trump wasn’t willing to fire Pete Hegseth, he was at least going to have to fire Mike Waltz. But Trump, who keeps getting more tepid with his decision-making by the day, failed to do so.
Trump missed his window, and this point the Signalgate scandal is never fully going away. So of course now Trump is finally tepidly firing someone over it. Trump has ousted Waltz as National Security Adviser and replaced him with… Marco Rubio. That’s not a joke. As Trump’s cognitive universe continues to get smaller, he’s now assigning multiple titles to the people whose names he can still remember.
Waltz wasn’t technically fired. But he’s been shifted to UN Ambassador, which is certainly a firing in real world terms. It means Trump has shipped Waltz off to the UN Headquarters in New York, far away from Trump’s White House in Washington DC, and far away from any remaining influence in the Trump regime.
And so Mike Waltz has ended up being the scapegoat. But because Trump waited five weeks to finally make a move that he should have known on day one he was going to have to make, this firing isn’t going to do him any good. Worse for Trump, he’s still got scandal-a-minute Pete Hegseth on the job, which means this mess is only going to continue getting worse for Trump.
But the bizarre part is that even five weeks after Trump had to know that firing Waltz was on the table, he and his team never did manage to come up with anyone to take the job. Now they’ve got Marco Rubio serving as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. Oh well. At least that’ll mean one less person in the next Signal chat.
